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WPCNR THE EASTER SUNDAY BAILEY. Impressions of past, present and future by John F. Bailey. April 17, 2022:
After a stormy windy rainy night, dawn broke through clear blue skies this Easter Sunday in White Plains New York USA.
It conjured up my little boyhood memories, of waking up in my parents’ home off Bear Ridge Road in Pleasantville, picking up my Easter Basket with the green paper grass in it and bounding downstairs in my pajamas with the feet in them joining my sisters, Suzanne and Phyllis seeking hidden Easter Candy delivered by “Peter Cottontail.”
Days leading up to Easter I’d spin Gene Autry on an old Golden Record, singing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail hopping down the Bunny Trail, Hippity Hop,Easter’s on its Way.”
There were yellow candy chicks hidden behind furniture, chocolate bunnies standing up looking up at you in plain site, chocolate eggs behind photographs of the past , jelly beans, sugar coated bars and the occasional marshmellow-filled bunny with a coated of thin chocolate. My mother made pancakes for breakfast. Dad read the paper while mom cooked.
After a late breakfast we went to church at the Old Presbyterian Church on Bedford Road as a family.
I wore a jacket and tie, my father and mother dressed their Sunday finest and I went to church being the oldest child while the sisters went to their Sunday School classes. The Congregation sang the Easter hymns, that had a robust uplifting cadence, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” and they made you feel so good. You felt the hope that the Easter Sunday brings fitting with the spring.
In the afternoon my mother and father who grew up in Pleasantive took us all to Grandmother’s House on Sunnyside Avenue. A tall no-nonsense Old School Grandmother, she would prepare the entire Sunday Dinner herself in the tiniest kitchen with gas stove, and the smallest counterspace any cook had to work with.
She prepared Leg of Lamb, with mint sauce, asparagus, mashed potatoes creamed potatoes, peas and corn and pie. All the aunts and uncles and cousins were expected to attend. My grandmother Gertrude Pinneo considered family attendance on Easter Sunday a mandatory function by all in the family. Oh, and the smaller kids always sat at a “Kid’s Table,” during dinner. Eventually when we became old enough we graduated to the adults table (a big day when this happened for the first time)
When I was very young, my Great Grandfather at a very advanced age I can still see him in a rocker in the living room furnished in art deco style old candlestick phone in the corner, high backed chairs desk in the living room with a warm blanket over his knees, observing the socializing, highlight by my Grandmother’s signature hors d’oeuvres. Ritz crackers with peanut butter, sweet relish cottage cheese with a sweet gherkin pickle on top.
When I grew older, and was playing trombone in the Pleasantville High School Military Band, the leader of the band, Wilbur Lockwood, teacher of music at Pleasantville High, a member of the Presbyterian Church, assembled a brass ensemble of trumpets, trombones and clarinets and flutes to play at sunrise services on top of Flag Hill in Pleasantville. (Of course my parents had to drive me there). The sound of the instruments playing those old time hymns of joy resounded from the heights on the west side of Pleasantville in the crisp air are one of the experiences I never regret participating in.
That is why I attend the First Baptist Church Sunrise Service every year at the highest spot in White Plains.
It was crisp and cold this morning I drove over. The attentive crowd of about 30 or so persons, shivering in the 42 degree weather on a chill, invigorating morning listened to the Reverend Timothy Dalton leading the ceremony with Worship Minister, Matthew Perez. You can see the service in the video at the top of this story highlight by the most magnificent sun appearance.
